China Book Review. Issue 3

Author: Deng Zhenglai
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2005-12-01
Features: China Review is a major comprehensive academic book review publication that focuses on academia. It publishes one issue per year, serving as a free platform for intellectuals at home and abroad to introduce, discuss, and critique academic works and intellectual trends. The purpose of China Review is to promote academic critique and elevate Chinese scholarship. For Chinese scholarship to develop, it must establish its own autonomy. Regarding the issue of Chinese academic autonomy, I believe that emphasizing the need to clearly distinguish the field of Chinese academic research from the economic, social, and political fields, according to its operational logic, can be considered the domestic dimension of academic autonomy. Thus, it is also a challenge that every nation's scholarship faces in its development process.
It is well-known that in the current development of Chinese scholarship, there exists a very common phenomenon: researchers often uncritically apply some Western concepts or theoretical frameworks to the analysis of Chinese society. Based on this, I argue that in our knowledge practices, we must respond to the question of how the field of Chinese scholarship can be autonomous from the "cultural hegemony" of the Western social field under the current global structure. Perhaps our response may not be very effective, but as long as we begin to address this issue, our efforts will signify that our awareness of Chinese academic autonomy has already been established.